‘Sh*tstorm Pile Up’— Bad Recruitment (feat. Roxette)

First off: this isn’t a recruitment professional character assassination. It’s a personal vendetta. But if you’re a recruiter with a guilty conscience, employer with a bad rep, or a candidate that asks 'how high?' when told to jump, read on…

Let me (and Roxette) enlighten you.

The recruiter’s raison d’etre isn’t hard to fathom — find good people good jobs with good companies.

Strange then that this often gets lost in translation.

Client: We need a web developer with digital marketing experience…

Recruiter: Right. Got it. Flower arranger with business development potential.

I’m exaggerating, of course (kinda). But even those that do a good job of finding the right kind of people all-too-often fall down in their candidate conduct.

I get that it’s a buyer’s market. And when employers hold the upper hand, as well as the purse strings, the recruiter’s principal aim is to retain that business by vetting and selecting good people.

Does that make it ok to mess candidates around? Apparently so.

Case in point: a personal experience with a footwear brand. It wasn’t the fact I didn’t get the job. Nor was it the total lack of post-interview communication (ok, it was a bit); it was the sudden shift from nonchalance to enthusiasm to silence to rejection.

Was it me? Was I that unimpressive in person? Which boxes didn’t I tick? I cared for about five seconds… when I heard back 10 weeks later.

I had a bit of banter with the interviewers; I felt comfortable enough to ask for an update via LinkedIn, and was assured I was still being considered; some seven weeks after meeting the team. Odd then that the rejection email was from a ‘do-not-respond’ address — and I’ve still yet to hear from an actual person.

Surely, if an employer takes the time to connect with a candidate, flies them overseas, and spends an afternoon with them, they’d want to give a personal reply — even if recruitment protocols stipulate the need for faceless bot-generated rejection notes? Apparently not.

“Unfortunately we were not able to consider you for this position because we have already selected a candidate for this position”.

But then why would they indulge someone they’ve chosen not to employ? The role was recruited for by an in-house team, so there can be no excuses really. You could (almost) forgive an agency for this kind of conduct. Their very existence puts a barrier in place.

In (most) recruiters’ defence, candidates can be flaky. But they have no loyalty to the agency or employer. Everyone seems to forget that. An interview is essentially an opportunity for all parties to sniff each other out: for the candidate to investigate the company and staff. It’s not just an excuse for nosy would-be employers to rifle through social media profiles as an exercise in ‘candidate research’.

Wankers always get found out (that goes for candidates as well as employers and recruiters BTW). A few years back, I worked for a pair of absolute arseholes*. Charming as fuck. But complete arseholes. Who paid very well.

Everyone (but me) knew about the bullying, unreasonable demands, and high staff turnover. Even the recruiter, who ‘just couldn’t understand why people kept leaving after three months’ (but obvs told me this once I’d been given my marching orders for refusing to play treat-junior-staff-like-skidmarked-underpants).

Surely recommending staff for an agency like the one I worked for — knowing that the proprietors were akin to the wretched offspring of Thatcher, Trump, and Saddam — was an act of malpractice on the recruiter’s part? Not when it’s easy enough to write it off as a ‘personality clash’ or ‘cost cutting exercise’.

Should recruiters be more discerning about the employers they work for? Maybe. But that’d completely undermine their purpose. High staff turnover = more hires needed = more profit.

The thing is, recruiters are seen by companies as a necessary evil. A worthwhile exercise in talent acquisition. So they’re treated that way. For job seekers, they’re all too often regarded as an essential conduit — gatekeepers wielding power and influence over key decision makers. Until these perceptions change, this facade of a hierarchy will persist.

When the shit keeps falling from on-high — from employer to recruiter, from recruiter to candidate — the employer-candidate relationship gets off to a bad start too.

So where does this stop?

It stops when employers acknowledge the need take more responsibility for the people they’re hiring; a mythical time when recruiters start refusing to work with wankers and arseholes, and instead begin focusing on the candidate experience — rather than bending over backwards (or forwards for that matter) to accommodate the employer’s demands.

At the end of the day, without candidates there’d be no talent. And without businesses, there’d be no employers. But without recruiters? Well, there’d be a lot less hassle in some ways.

Maybe it’s time to re-examine the value they bring. For their sakes.

*Just my opinion -- for the record

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